The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street This Week

3. Tell Me More, Tell Me More

Verizon (VZ - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr) got all excited this week about expanding the availability of high-speed Internet service. "Millions of people soon will have an additional choice for broadband Internet access when Verizon expands its mass-market broadband capabilities by nearly 30% this year," the company says.

Where have we heard that one before?

Oh, yeah, now we remember. "We're intensifying our commitment to making ... DSL a mass-market service and responding to the thousands of customers who've told us they want DSL as fast as we can get it to them," the company said.

Of course, that was back in 1999, when Verizon was known as Bell Atlantic.

4. All in the Family

It warmed our heart to read the Securities and Exchange Commission complaint filed this week against HealthSouth (HRC - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr) and its longtime chairman, Richard Scrushy.

See, by 1997, says the SEC, certain senior accounting personnel at the medical services company started referring to themselves as "family members," and started gathering together regularly at what they called "family meetings."

Family members at family meetings. How sweet! Don't all corporations aspire to create One Big, Happy Family?

Unfortunately, alleges the SEC, the purpose of these meetings was to manage a long-running scheme to artificially inflate HealthSouth's earnings, a scheme the SEC says began and continued at Scrushy's insistence.

Yes, that's a sweet family business, as long as daddy is named Tony Soprano.

5. What If They Gave a Shareholder Meeting and Nobody Came?

Call us cynics, but we at the Five Dumbest Things Research Lab suspect that companies sometimes don't want shareholders to show up at shareholder meetings.

Yes, while companies are happy to come to New York to meet with professional investors, it seems to us that when annual meeting time rolls around each year, corporate America retreats to less densely populated areas. Could it be that corporate executives, bracing themselves to go face to face with cranky shareholders, seek out locations featuring relatively few cranky individuals within driving distance?

Just a theory. But one we think about this week in the context of Disney's (DIS - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr) annual shareholder meeting, which was held this Wednesday.

Yes, it's been six years since the House of Mouse has held its peripatetic annual meeting in either of the major coastal investment and population centers of New York or Los Angeles. Sure, the company hasn't gone completely AWOL -- the 2000 meeting, for example, was in Chicago -- but generally speaking, as the stock has slid, so has the population of the cities Disney has been camping out in. In 2001 the meeting was in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex, in 2002 it was in Hartford, Conn., and this past week it was in Denver (which clearly represents a step up from Hartford while being smaller than Dallas).

Even the most agoraphobic Disney executive, however, likely thought things went too far with Wednesday's meeting. Because of a snowstorm in Denver, hardly anyone showed up to hear the company lower financial forecasts for the year. The Rocky Mountain News, in fact, counted only 42 shareholders in attendance. About the only thing useful that came out of the meeting, it appears, was the News' headline: "Snow white dwarfs turnout for Disney."